8 comments:

p.s., when you did your favorite pie story contest post, I couldn't think of anything.

Well, now I have...LOL....a big joke in our family for years has been my Mom's Cherry pie. The joke is that the only cherry in Mom's Cherry Pie is the one little bitty single marachino cherry that she put on the top of the pie....

I'm wondering why lamb is so expensive? Lamb chops are $12.99/pound, and my daughter saw some other cuts for $15.99/lb! I settled for some ground lamb at $5.99/lb which I will make lamb burgers from, but at that price, I can't afford to buy it very often. What's the story? Does the price go down in the spring?

Hi LSB,Your 'dreams of a nice step ladder' comment cracked me up. Thankfully Edward is a lot bigger and bulkier than he was two years ago - when he decided it would just be easier to tear through ELEVEN strands of barbed wire. The ensuing lambing season was a little busier than we'd planned!

Hi Ginny,You're right - lamb does tend to cost more than other meats. I think a lot of that simply has to do with the size of the animal. For example, you get a lot more meat from a steer that weighs 1,100 pounds than from a lamb that weighs 120 pounds (which will only yield about 50 pounds of meat - and many lambs are butchered at a much smaller weight), and yet both animals take many months to reach that size.

Hogs are not only often butchered at 240 pounds or more, but sows also have a whole bunch of piglets at once, and she's pregnant for less than four months.

A ewe is pregnant for five months, and while some people raise breeds of sheep that go into heat year round so that they can squeeze three or four lambing seasons into two years, that wears out the ewe really fast - and is rough on her in the first place, especially if she's having twins each time.

I think supply and demand also has to do with the price - as well as quality of meat. Lamb is not nearly as popular in the U.S. as it is in some other countries. On the one hand, this is good, because American lambs are not generally raised in the huge (and horrible) industrial factory farms where much of this country's 'cheap' beef and pork comes from.

Costs are much higher when you're a farmer raising animals naturally and humanely on a small scale. For example, we recently sold some feeder lambs to a local farmer (who will raise them up to butcher weight) for about $65 apiece. Our butcher lambs, which we raise for 12 to 14 months, bring us a gross profit of about $250 each. Each ewe has one or two lambs (twins) a year - so if we're selling her twins for $130, that money must cover all of her care and feeding expenses for a year. Anything left after that is profit.

Two years ago, we spent nearly $10,000 fencing some of our grazing fields. That fencing, while necessary (and something we put off for many, many years because of the tremendous expense), will never truly pay for itself.

Much of the lamb you see for sale in the U.S. is actually imported from Australia and New Zealand, where the animals are naturally grass fed (like ours are), which takes longer to fatten them up - plus you're paying for them to be transported around the world.

That said, lamb really isn't all that much more expensive than beef if you compare 'apples' to 'apples.' The cheap prices for supermarket meats are often artificially low because they're coming from factory farms where, as I mentioned, conditions inside are often horrible, terrible damage is done by them to the environment, and the animals are regularly given dangerous things like growth hormones, constant doses of antibiotics, etc. Basically, you're getting cheap meat at a very high cost.

At places like Whole Foods, where all of the meat in the butcher case is natural and of very high quality, the price of lamb is often about even with beef.

Lamb rib chops and loin chops are the finest cuts, and at $15 to $20 per pound, they compare in price to the top beef steak cuts. I've seen boneless leg of lamb regularly selling there for under $8 a pound, which is a very fair price.

A great way to get really good lamb for a lower price is to buy a whole one directly from the farmer (or split one with a friend). And here's where the smaller size of the animals can actually be a good thing. Not everybody has freezer space for 700 pounds of beef, but an entire butchered lamb will fit in even the smallest of chest freezers.

We sell our butcher lambs directly to the 'end users,' who have them custom cut and packaged to their specifications. Their total cost ends up averaging $6 to $8 per pound (depending on what cuts they choose) for ALL cuts, which compares to the retail price of ground lamb.

I've been meaning to put up a blog post about our lamb - we're taking orders now for late spring/early summer 2011 butcher lambs and will be delivering to St. Louis and possibly somewhere like Rolla, which is right on I-44 and is sort of midway both north/south and east/west in the state.

If anybody is interested, you can email me for more information. farmgirlfare AT gmail DOT com. We work hard to raise delicious, all natural meat, and many of our customers tell us ours is the best lamb they've ever tasted. :)

A great resource for finding locally raised lamb (and just about any other kind of food you can think of) is LocalHarvest.org.

For food that not only tastes good but will make you feel good, support local, family owned farms! :)

January 2013 update: I know word verification is a big pain, but it's the only way I can stop the ridiculous number of anonymous spam comments I get every day. I don't want to require commenters to be registered Blogger or Open ID users because I know many of you aren't. Thanks so much for your understanding!

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